Well I’m back. It wasn’t perfect, but we had a good time. I’ll do a write up tomorrow with some pics.
My fucking phone camera lately has been making the grinding sound when you first turn it on and it won’t focus. Seemed even worse today. Granted this isn’t the best thing to use, but under 2 years old and expensive and it making a weird grinding noise which I am sure it not user serviceable rather chaps me…
But no one went blind, so that’s a plus.
Here’s mine from the other thread. iPhone 7 Plus with solar glasses over the lens from my back deck in the Seattle area.
Turned out pretty well. I used ProCam to crank down the ISO as low as I could.
The sky decided to be a little dramatic for my viewing. A few pouring thunderstorms early in the morning, followed by a lot of sporadic cloud cover, with the sun peaking out for just a few seconds at a time. Which is, by the way, a fantastic way to enforce brief viewing intervals. Also, while I feel like most people have indeed seen the rain coming down on a sunny day at some point or another, I can now claim to have seen the rain coming down through a partial eclipse.
It cleared up as we neared totality though, and the last cloud drifted out of the way almost exactly before totality set in. The gap before more clouds moved in was long enough for the entire 2 minutes and 30 odd seconds of totality we got, so I was extremely fortunate in that regard.
I was sadly unsurprised to find the neighbors out in the Missouri countryside celebrated the return of the sun with random gunfire. I was somewhat surprised, however to learn that it is possible to use a Cheez-It as an eclipse projector.
From North Alabama, in the 97% area:
Yes, my daughter’s school did let the kids outside - yay. However, there was no attempt, at least in my daughter’s grade, to make this part of the larger lesson planning, either before or after - boo. I made and brought with a shoe box pin hole viewer, and the kids had no idea what it was. So, I showed them how it worked, and they were lined up to take a peek. A few of them were comparing the pin hole image with what they saw through their glasses throughout the time outside, which was fun.
I tried that but had issues with stability as I didn’t have anything to set it down on.
Best Part. reality bending.
It was cloudy/overcast here in Minneapolis, and I missed being able to use the pinhole projector.
Thought I would still enjoy just sitting outside to sense the light changing in general…there are no windows in the place where I’m working now…finally took my lunch break and got outdoors about ten minutes after peak time…and then, although you’d think it would get lighter and lighter out after peak time, instead heavy black rain clouds were rolling in and it got darker and darker—so that was sort of anti-eclipse-like!
I heard that people from another department there had been out during the first half with the special glasses, and there were still enough breaks in the clouds at that point for them to catch a few glimpses of the eclipse. I’m glad they were able to see it.
Next total eclipse in the US will be seven years from now. I’ve been thinking about Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in a Day”…anyone else recall it?
While searching for footage yesterday’s eclipse on Vimeo I ran across the following footage of a total eclipse that took place March 20, 2015. Posting it here because it’s simply beautiful and otherworldly. Enjoy.
Photos from NASA:
Just WOW!
Down the NASA rabbit hole…
Awesome images.
Ugh. Parents called and talked my ear off. I will have to update tomorrow. Good news, my dad is clear to do what ever he wants after his heart attack and his book is almost done being proofread.
Wow, how did they get the milky way in that first one?? I hope there is no digital manipulation. I mean, I like pretty pictures, but if that is as it was, then someone who knows what they are doing worked hard to get that to come out right.
It was cool to see the eclipse down in Oregon. A guy had a 10" binocular projection set up, and the crowd of hundreds (maybe thousands) let out an audible gasp at the diamond flash before the general cheering took over during totality.
My trip/weekend was terrible, but it could have been worse and I wouldn’t do it differently.
Ok - sorry for the slow update, but here it is:
So the kiddo and I had a field trip for the eclipse. I found an eclipse tracker map and wanted to be as close to the blue line as possible for the longest totality. It is east of a small town of Lathrop in MO on SE Mule Barn Rd. (see image, bullseye was the blue line and the road intersecting) I was going to pull off the side of the road and picnic with Lydia, even bringing a bucket potty if needed. But just north of there, you can see on the map, was a berry farm with food and port-a-pottys so I decided to go there for for the kiddo’s sake and it was only .7 miles away.
So we had a great spot but the damn weather didn’t cooperate. It started to rain hard and we sat in the car. But about 20 min after the start of the eclipse it stopped raining. It was partly cloudy but for the next hour or so kept peeking out so we could see the moon move across the sun. She really liked it and took notes for school. Too bad it was so dim from the clouds. I wanted to do a pin hole camera and maybe make a cyanotype, but it wasn’t bright enough. I could use a lens to project an image of the clouds on to white paper. But still I wish we could have done a few more science things. I did make us viewing shields out of paper plates to help block any light around the glasses.
Unfortunately for the actual totality we could not see it directly but did experience 2min and 40 secs of darkness and the sudden cooling down. It was really neat.
When it was over I was hoping to stay awhile as the show was only half over. If it cleared up we could see the moon leave the sun. But it got worse and then started to rain again. So we headed home. Getting there only too an hour but due to traffic, construction, and accidents I took back roads home so it took us 2.5 hours. But we had enough time to finish watching Ghostbusters.
In the end she said she had a great time, and while I wish it was better, that is what it was all about.
The farm house north of the blue line is where we ended up.
This sorta shows just how dark it got.
PS after screwing things up and panicking, I managed to replace my laptop keyboard!! Had to jerry rig a solution after breaking the damn clip that holds they keyboard ribbon the motherboard. I can use the X key again! Yay! XXxxxXxxxX
Stumbled across this look at how we used to view eclipses when I was a kid. I’m marginally younger than the kids in the photos, but was probably watching the same eclipse with the same equipment at another school not many miles from theirs:
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